To obtain an acoustic image conventionally a phased array is used. Such an approach to be done properly to obtain a two-dimensional image requires a great deal of computing power which cannot be contained in a miniature, hand-held, battery powered unit. A more direct approach would employ an array of individual acoustic transducers in conjunction with an acoustic lens, but this would be unduly complex and expensive. Each acoustic pixel or sensor, of which there would be thousands for suitable resolution, would require one or more conductors interconnecting each transducer with the associated signal processing circuits. The number of conductors could be reduced if the signals were multiplexed, but wiring thousands of transducer elements to multiplexers is itself a prohibitively costly and complex approach. The result is that there is presently available no practical implementation for an acoustic retina image sensor. Current acoustic transducers on micromachinied silicon chips (see U.S. Pat. No. 5,209,119) have low sensitivity because they are limited to thin films of PZT in the range of 0.1 to 0.5 microns. In addition, present micromachined acoustic transducers are unidirectional in that the sensing mechanism is exposed to external forces on one side only of the support substrate. This can be critical in situations where electronic circuits are added to the substrate on the front side.